New Legends
- February 22, 2002 00:00 AM PST
THQ�s epic Xbox action/adventure has a lot going for it�and a lot going against it. One side has to come out victorious.
New Legends is a game at war with itself. On one front, hero Sun Soo and his allies struggle against the endless hordes of the evil warlord Xao Gon in an epic action/adventure; on another, great ideas clash headlong with lame execution in a grand struggle for gameplay dominance. But the question isn�t who will win? The question is will you play long enough to find out?
Yin
Fighting for the League of Things That Are Really Cool: a great manga-inspired �ancient future China� setting; intuitive, simple to pick-up dual analog controls; loads of enemies to battle; a huge arsenal of stylin� weapons with fantastic moves and the added ability to wield a different one in each hand; epic battle whooshes, clashes, and other such sound effects; and a free PC game�style camera that gives you freedom to view your epic clashes from virtually any angle.
Yang
Fighting for the Legion of Suck: simple graphics and awfully flat environment textures that look like they belong on a Dreamcast; jittery, glitchy animation and an inconsistent frame rate; wonky collision detection; unclear mission objectives that leave you lost and confused; and really stupid A.I.-controlled allies that fight all right, but tend to fall off cliffs when they�re supposed to be leading you to your next goal. And the �free� camera is both a blessing and a curse since it tends to leave you with less-than-desirable angles �til you step in and manually remedy the situation, and makes long-range weapons usage a bit of a war in itself. These are the kinds of fundamental gameplay follies that can leave a gamer cold.
The Middle Path
You want to like this game�you really do�and every now and then, when the �ber-cool ideas outmaneuver the sloppy execution, you�ll find that you actually can�especially later in the game, when battles become crazier and you�ve earned hyper-nifty weapons like the chain blade and Tri-Wind. New Legends could go down as one of the best bad games ever made.
